


as thin as a choice

by qwanderer



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (whispers) it's totally Keith, Allura thinks about Lance and Shiro thinks about someone, F/M, Found Family, Gen, M/M, S7 Spoilers, mostly gen fic but with discussions of past and future relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-11 22:00:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15981368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qwanderer/pseuds/qwanderer
Summary: How could she counsel the people of Earth to fight back, to keep fighting back when so many of their people had already been lost? How could she tell them to fight until their last breath? Because it would be their last breath, if Sendak had anything to say about it. She'd known that, but having heard the simulacrum of the man actually say it had made it all the more vivid.





	as thin as a choice

After everything... after waking up to find that Altea had been destroyed and she'd lost ten thousand years and everyone but Coran, after having to mourn her father a second time, after Lotor... after almost losing Shiro again, and losing three more years... after the void trying to pull them all apart... after _everything_... the dry dusty air of earth felt cleansing. 

Blue felt grounded here. This planet was home to all the other paladins, and although Allura had never set foot here, she felt that settled sense of returning to home ground through her bond with Blue, who had lived here for the entire ten thousand years she'd been asleep. Blue may have stopped at Saturn with the others, but that simply meant that the lion reveled in any sensation she could send through their bond, the dust of the desert around the Garrison giving slightly under her boots, the smell of sun-baked stone and the chirping sound of the insects humans called "crickets." 

Along with the other paladins who had actually earned the privilege, all three Alteans were given the uniforms of senior cadets at the Garrison. Allura wasn't sure how to feel about the stiff orange-and-white garments. Romelle complained sharply, but didn't hesitate to put them on. Coran stared at his reflection contemplatively for several minutes, adjusting this and that, before saying, "That's actually quite dashing, if I do say so myself." 

"It does bring out the color of your moustache, doesn't it," Allura agreed with a small smile. She adjusted her own cuffs, threw her shoulders back, and contemplated her own reflection once again. 

The fit was good, she decided, and the color reminded her of Coran, and also of Hunk and Pidge. The whole of the family she'd managed to salvage out of all this, really. It was so... Earth. And they'd all worn this in their time, she reminded herself. Even Shiro, who had since graduated to the grey coat the officers here wore. 

"It's a decent compromise," Shiro had explained to the Alteans when he gave them the uniforms. "People around here aren't in the habit of having civilians in their planning sessions and around classified material like the new ships. You aren't exactly civilians, but you also aren't Garrison officers. These can be sort of a visual shorthand - they say something like, 'these people belong here, but they might not know everything about how we do things yet'." 

A part of Allura had a distinct desire to earn a grey coat of her own, to gain the trust of these people and a place here. The rest of her dismissed it as a silly whim, brought on by her admiration of the more elegant uniform. She was Altean. She was the Altean princess, Alfor's heir, the last of the royal line. She shouldn't need any more roles or titles than that. 

* * *

Earth's planning sessions turned out to be an argumentative mess... so much like the way she remembered the councils of the Paladins of Voltron from her youth. There were those who believed in strict discipline and an inviolable system of hierarchy, and those who clearly did not. 

At least around this table, everyone knew what planet would be their first priority to defend. The one they stood on. Earth. 

Unfortunately, protecting it would be no easy task. 

Allura did what she could to build a proper AI out of Sendak's memories, one that would answer their questions while still retaining enough of Sendak's personality to answer them accurately. And then she stood in front of her creation, and it began to dawn on her exactly what she'd created. 

A chilling copy of their most dangerous enemy. 

Every time he talked, it made her skin crawl. The feeling built and built as he spoke about this method and that tactic, all the while expressionless, cold, matter-of-fact. Allura might have doubted her ability to reproduce the programming that had transformed her father's memories into an echo of him so vivid that she felt his warmth when he spoke to her, but she knew Sendak from many transmissions, recordings and battles. She knew that Sendak really was simply that cold. That calculating, uncaring, unsympathetic. 

The worst of the Galra. 

She tried to focus on the information he gave them, but even that was not so easy to swallow. As they narrowed in on the most relevant questions, the most similar conquests to Earth's, the familiarity of it all made Allura feel continually sicker. 

Then he said, "If a planet refuses to give up, then we annihilate it. But only one planet has ever refused.... Altea." 

She swallowed, jaw working. She was going to be sick right here, if she wasn't careful. 

"I'm sorry. I think I need a break." 

She fled, needing to be alone, needing to think. 

* * *

How could she counsel the people of Earth to fight back, to keep fighting back when so many of their people had already been lost? How could she tell them to fight until their last breath? Because it would be their last breath, if Sendak had anything to say about it. She'd known that, but having heard the simulacrum of the man actually say it had made it all the more vivid. 

But even if surrender was a viable alternative, which it was not, Allura knew the paladins. She knew the people of Earth through them and their families. She knew they could never be convinced to give up. 

There were only two possible outcomes. Either they or Sendak would die. All she could do was give them everything she could in terms of knowledge and tools that could help them in their fight, and fight beside them. 

She wished she could still hear her father speak, or at least his simulacrum, to bolster her against the hopelessness that threatened to drown her when Sendak spoke. She closed her eyes and tried to remember. What would he sound like? What would he say? 

_There are times we must fight, but we must not let fighting become all we are. We must always remember what we are fighting to build. There are those with the power to destroy and those with the power to create, and the difference between the two is as thin as a choice._

The memory struck her, suddenly and deeply. Voltron may have been a weapon, but that had never been all that Voltron was. The lions her father had built were alive, and they were tools that helped their paladins carry out so many tasks, not just fighting but also traveling, carrying other people and things to where they were needed. And she remembered Yellow lifting the Ark of Taujeer, Green reinforcing crumbling structures with its vines, Blue freezing the shielding panel in place while Red welded it together. 

Black holding on to everything that was Shiro when his body failed. 

Weapons that built. Weapons that kept people alive. 

If Allura was tired of war and death, perhaps she should turn her thoughts to doing the same. 

Her thoughts went to Shiro's missing arm, the Galra prosthetic that he'd become so accustomed to using in battle. And the prosthetics that Commander Holt had designed, wanting only a power source that could match the output of the Balmera crystals. 

There had to be a way to make it work with technology available here on Earth. There would be no more Balmera crystals for them here, and they couldn't leave to get any, not until after they'd defeated Sendak. They would need to be able to work with what they had. 

She went and found the prosthetics. 

Allura reached out with her mind, with the senses she'd used to search Haggar's lair, and examined what the humans had done with the information from the Castle. The structure itself was solid, not quite what an Altean engineer might have done, but not too far off. And here - their imitation of a crystal, a mess in her senses, but clearly containing energy. Volatile, and not enough for the arm, but still, she could see the potential. 

She read Sam's notes on the project, discovering that at its core it was a chemical energy storage system, like many that humans used, but its output was controlled and shaped by a network of laser-cut microsupercapacitors. 

That could work. If she tweaked it here, nudged it there, took that chemical power core and infused it with the stability that could only come from an alchemist wielding concentrated quintessence. 

Now it would hold ten times the power, but with less danger of catastrophic failure. 

She sent for Shiro, wanting to share the knowledge of this possibility with him as soon as possible. She watched his face as he laid eyes on the prosthetic for the first time. 

His eyes widened, a cautious light in them as he looked it over. 

"So this floats independently?" he asked. "Like Sendak's arm?" 

"I'm afraid it doesn't quite have the power of that particular arrangement," Allura told him. She thought he seemed relieved to hear that. "But yes. The principal is similar. It should move however you wish it to inside the range of a normal human arm, and with practice, you should be able to manage short projections outside of that range." 

"Can I?" he asked, reaching out towards it. 

"It's your arm," she told him. "If you want it." 

He ran a palm over the cool white casing, then picked it up, moving it into the vague area where it might sit if connected and powered. 

"You were having trouble with interacting with a reproduction of Sendak," he said with a dry twist of humor, "so your solution was to go work on giving one of your friends a floating arm, too?" 

She rolled her eyes, a gesture she seemed to have picked up from the younger human paladins. "Sendak himself scares me, yes, but it was the things he said that were getting to me. I lost my home, so much of my family, and a great deal of what's kept me sane over the past months was the idea that you, the paladins, were my new family, and your home was a refuge from the Galra. It's bad enough to have come here only to find that they've already taken Earth. But to hear from Sendak's own mouth that he will never give up until a planet is cowed or until it is destroyed, as Altea was destroyed?" She closed her eyes. "Yes, it made me want to level the playing field in any way I could." 

"I get it," Shiro said quietly. "When places stop feeling safe, you build your home in people." 

She hadn't realized that's what she'd been doing, but it rang true. 

"Yes," she agreed. 

"I didn't realize how much I did the same until I realized Earth didn't feel much like home any more, with Keith and the Holts in space more often than not, and Adam gone." Shiro's voice seemed to stall out with those last two words. They seemed to echo, even in the small space. 

"Who was Adam?" she asked gently. 

"I wanted to marry him," Shiro answered, voice low and rough. 

"Oh, Shiro." 

"We weren't exactly together still when I left," he said, but then he sighed. "That doesn't make any of this better." 

"No, I suppose not," she agreed. 

Shiro looked at her curiously. "Did you have anyone, back on Altea?" he asked. 

"Nothing serious. But people I cared for, yes. People I would have liked to explore the prospect of a future with." She wiped her eyes surreptitiously. "But there's no use thinking of what might have been. There are other futures I may yet be able to explore." 

Shiro made a soft sound in response, eyes distant. 

"He would have wanted you to build a new life. He would have wanted you to be happy." 

His expression spoke clearly, even if the words never met the air. _How can you know that?_

"My father told me the same." 

The barest smile touched the corners of Shiro's mouth, and he nodded, accepting that. 

* * *

Shiro's surgery went well. All the paladins stood ready to help if necessary, if only as moral support. Sam was in charge of this part, getting the arm online and powered. 

At first it seemed to work. An orange glow lit up the ports. The arm rose at Shiro's bidding. Then everything went sideways. 

The din of machines and the scurry of doctors was incomprehensible to Allura, but it was clear something had gone wrong. Something, somewhere in the chain, was incompatible. 

Allura searched for a reason. She'd checked and double-checked the human power source's compatibility with the Altean tech in the arm. So if it wasn't that.... 

Could it be Shiro? 

The orange glow looked wrong on Shiro. He may have once worn the color as a cadet here on Earth, but now, with his white hair.... 

This wasn't the same body. And after everything he'd been through, his soul filtered through her own Altean being and through the Black Lion, her father's creation, there had been changes there, too. 

The battery she'd helped create was Earth technology at its heart, but there was a disconnect between its energy and Shiro's. 

Shiro's energy, as she remembered from holding his soul inside her own, was cool and flowing, not warm and jagged as the energy of this place so often was. 

The batteries might work for most humans, but Shiro needed a Balmera crystal. 

There was one here. Small, far too small to power any of the humans' ships, but big enough for this. Her circlet. She hadn't thought about it as anything but a piece of jewelry, a symbol, in a long time. But it was what they needed now. It was a Balmera crystal. 

For a moment, she found herself hesitating to give up the last symbolic link to the throne of Altea. 

But she could not hesitate. The difference was as thin as this choice. Giving up her father's echo. Giving up her crown. These things were not a surrender or a retreat. They were not an act of destruction. 

They were an attack. They were an act of creation. They gave her new family, her new world, the best opportunity to survive. 

She was of Earth now, and she would not surrender. 

She pushed the crystal into place, and as she watched, Shiro's breathing grew easier, his vitals steadying. 

Her breathing grew easier then, too. 

* * *

Shiro sounded so confident in all of them, when he told them that they could call their lions here from half a system away. 

She believed they could win. But she also couldn't let Lance go without first doing everything she could to make sure she didn't lose another potential future. 

"Stay safe out there," she told him. 

Most of the battle passed in a blur, one thing following so quickly after another that there was no way to preserve anything in a meaningful or organized way in her memory. 

Some moments she remembered. Shiro's voice, so steady. The only thing that kept her from complete panic when Lance failed to check in. 

Being captured, and forging a link with the lions that was stronger than ever before. The air of Earth around Blue, the open sky and white clouds. She _was_ Blue. Allura was Blue. Whipping past the Galra cruisers, laser cannons blazing. 

The Admiral's last words. "Do what I couldn't. Save Earth." 

Waking up and seeing the Red Lion standing alone against a Zaiforge cannon. 

"Lance. Hang on. I'm coming to help." 

That moment when they'd thought it was over, when Sendak fell and Shiro, with Keith's help, stood back up. Keith's speech when they'd realized they needed to rally themselves for another round. 

"This is Earth. This is our home." 

The paralyzed, helpless feeling that came in the aftermath of the drain from the Komar blades. 

In the connection through the lions, the feeling of Shiro's energy lighting up a lion... or not a lion. The awe of seeing Atlas walk. 

The sound of Keith's voice when he said, "It's been an honor to fly with you all." 

And nothing more. 

* * *

When she woke in the Garrison's medical wing, Coran, Romelle and the mice all around her, she knew that from now on, she would consider Earth her home. 

The Voltron Coalition was gathering here now, slowly but surely, so many of their allies coming to join in the rebuilding and celebration. She wanted to be there to greet their old friends, to head the diplomatic side of things with the Coalition, as she always had. But Coran was extremely insistent that she wasn't well enough, and as he or Romelle still had to help her to the bathroom when a trip there became necessary, she had to admit that he might have a point. 

Shiro was the one who took on that role instead, insisting that it was Earth's turn to play host to the Coalition. And the role seemed to suit him. 

Earth had no overarching system of noble or royal families, after all. As people so often chose their families, Earth chose their own royalty, their own leaders. And in many ways, Earth had chosen Shiro. 

As she watched his memorial speech over the viewing device in her room, she realized how much it was like looking in a mirror. His bearing, his clear awareness of the weight of his words, the persuasive confidence and determination. Even his newly white hair. 

If she had ever had a brother, he might have been like this. 

Yes, these people were her family. Yes, their home was her home. 

She could imagine building a place here, perhaps even having a gaggle of children with funny little round ears. She'd teach them about Altea, of course, teach them where she'd come from, but this would be where _they_ would be from. Earth. 

She felt an immense peace at knowing this ball of rock where they could all plant their feet wasn't going anywhere. Not with Voltron, Atlas, and the entire Coalition to protect it. 


End file.
